In the early 20th century, Tenth Avenue in Manhattan was infamously known as Death Avenue due to hundreds of deadly collisions between freight trains and street traffic. To fix this, the West Side Elevated Freight Railroad, now known as the High Line, was constructed in the 1930s. Rather than building around existing industrial facilities, engineers designed the steel structure to run directly through the interiors of factories and warehouses like the Bell Telephone Laboratories and the Nabisco building.
Integrating structural columns directly into building frames allowed trains to unload dairy, meat, and produce straight onto upper floor loading docks, completely bypassing street-level traffic. This seamless integration transformed urban logistics, enabling climate-controlled, dust-free offloading directly into processing plants without occupying valuable ground-level real estate. Although train operations ceased in 1980, these embedded columns remain visible today, reminding parkgoers of a time when infrastructure and architecture fused into a single functioning machine.